Learning from Accidents

Recently the study group I joined was talking about minor accidents and it was a good exercise to go through these cases reported by Rail Accident and Investigation Branch (RAIB), because these accidents most of the time are caused by similar underlying causes, and in left unchecked, will cause more serious accidents. If we look at major accidents, there are normally similar cases or near misses reported before the major ones, i.e. there are normally precursors to these things.

I would like to draw a parallel to our daily life, where big changes normally have precursors to them, but I don’t think in this instance it works that way. Instead, major changes in our life normally came and creeped upon us, without us realising it, and only years later we would look at that moment and saw how momentous it was to our current conditions. I remember and was reminded recently during a talk with my manager how I got my interview because I took a lift by a colleague, and during the 10 minutes drive, talked and explained my experience and situation. That, I believe landed me my interview, which one thing after another, allow me to work where I am now.

Similarly during high school, a classmate said to me that studying in Germany was hard, and I should do it, which caused me to put it as one of my options when applying for tertiary education, which allowed me to did my preparation before going to study in Germany, a whole 5 long years. All because someone said it was hard. To be honest, I think that classmate could have replaced Germany with some other country, and it would still be true, and I would still have applied and followed through. And like WB Yeats once wrote, and that made all the difference.

I don’t know what the future lies but I try to pepper good things here and there so that these small seeds will probably grow to become the branch that caused the great change in my life.

Thank you for reading.